they wanted to get rid of me

Lenin’s offensive was directed not only against Stalin person ally, but against his entire staff, and, first of all, his assistants, Dzerzhinsky and Ordzhonikidze. Both of them are mentioned constantly in Lenin’s correspondence on the Georgian question. Dzerzhinsky was a man of great and explosive passion. His energy was held at a high pitch by constant electric discharges. In every discussion, even of things of minor importance, he would fire up, his nostrils would quiver nu skin hk , his eyes would sparkle, and his voice would be so strained that often it would break. Yet, in spite of this high nervous tension, Dzerzhinsky had no apathetic intervals. He was always in that same state of tense mobilization. Lenin once compared him to a spirited thoroughbred. Dzerzhinsky fell in love, in a mad infatuation, with everything he did, and guarded his associates from criticism and interference with a passionate fanaticism that had no element of the personal in it, for he was completely dissolved in his work.

Dzerzhinsky had no opinions of his own. He never thought of himself as a politician, at least while Lenin was alive. On various occasions, he said to me: “I am not a bad revolutionary, perhaps, but I am no leader, statesman or politician.” This was not mere modesty; his self-appraisal was essentially right. In political matters, Dzerzhinsky always needed some one’s immediate guidance. For many years he had followed Rosa Luxemburg and with her had gone through not only the struggle against Polish patriotism, but that against Bolshevism as well. In 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks. Lenin said to me with great joy, “No traces of the old fight are left.” During the first two or three years, Dzerzhinsky was especially drawn to me. In his last years, he supported Stalin. In his economic work, he accomplished things through sheer temperament — appealing, urging, and lifting people off their feet by his own enthusiasm. He had no considered ideas about economic development. He shared all Stalin’s errors and defended them with all the passion of which he was capable. He died practically on his feet Propecia , just after he had left the platform from which he had so passionately been denouncing the opposition.

Stalin’s other ally, Ordzhonikidze, Lenin thought it necessary to expel from the party because of his bureaucratic high-handedness in the Caucasus. I argued against it. Lenin answered me through his secretary: “At least for two years.” How little could he imagine at that time that Ordzhonikidze would become head of the Control Commission that Lenin was planning to create to fight Stalin’s bureaucracy, and which was to embody the con science of the party.

Aside from its general political aims, the campaign that Lenin opened had as its immediate object the creation of the best conditions for my work of direction, either side by side with him if he regained his health, or in his place if he succumbed to his illness. But the struggle, which was never carried out to its end, or even part way, had exactly an opposite result. Lenin man aged only to declare war against Stalin and his allies, and even this was known only to those who were directly involved in it, and not to the party as a whole. Stalin’s faction — at that time it was still the faction of the trio — closed its ranks more tightly after the first warning. The indefinite situation continued. Stalin stood at the helm of the apparatus nu skin hk. Artificial selection was carried on there at a mad pace. The weaker the trio felt in matters of principle, the more they feared me — because  — and the tighter they had to bolt all the screws and nuts in the state and party system. Much later, in 1925, Bukharin said to me, in answer to my criticism of the party oppression: “We have no democracy because we are afraid of you.”